


you are my familiar

by Helendmeyourears



Series: NileWeek2020 [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:34:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26324974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helendmeyourears/pseuds/Helendmeyourears
Summary: Then the thought of her mother had sobered Nile, and she’d looked up to see Andy, Andy’s gaze steadily watching. She had the urge to ask if she was making the right choice, reuniting with her family. She knew the answer she’d get, though, and it wouldn’t change her decision, no matter how her stomach rolled with nerves.“Where will you all go?” she’d asked instead, looking away, fiddling with the straps of her bag.“With you, if you’ll have us.”
Series: NileWeek2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914307
Comments: 4
Kudos: 61





	you are my familiar

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Bastille's "4AM," because I am, apparently, incapable of picking titles that aren't song lyrics. This is my first piece for Tumblr's #nileweek2020!

The first time Andy explained to her that she prefers physical maps, Nile had found it funny. She’s never known anything but navigation apps, doesn’t even think she’s seen anyone whip out a whole, actual, paper pamphlet of one, except maybe in movies.

She knows Andy- all of them, really- have been using physical maps most of their lives. She imagines them charting courses, standing over a map laid out on a table in a low, candle-lit room, pointing to man-made lines drawn crudely onto thick, yellowing paper. The history they could tell, the people and the maps both, of where they’d been and what they did there.

Nile thinks she understood it a little better when Andy laid out all of Chicago before her, spread on the bed of their hotel room. All of the lines, the streets, winding like veins around the city she loves- she’d never have noticed on Google Maps, never understood the scope of this place that lives and breathes just like any of its residents.

She’d traced the line of the street she grew up on, the feeling of the paper beneath her finger like a physical reminder of the memories it holds. God, she had thought. Not even a month with them, and I’m already starting to sound like a senior citizen.

She’d remembered being young again, her and Josh poking fun at mom whenever she’d complained about newfangled technology.

“Back in my day-”

“We had to send messages through carrier pigeons!”

“For five whole miles.”

“In the snow!”

Then the thought of her mother had sobered her, and she’d looked up to see Andy, Andy’s gaze steadily watching. She had the urge to ask if she was making the right choice, reuniting with her family. She knew the answer she’d get, though, and it wouldn’t change her decision, no matter how her stomach rolled with nerves.

“Where will you all go?” she’d asked instead, looking away, fiddling with the straps of her bag.

“With you, if you’ll have us.”

Her head snapped up at that.

“You- what? Really?”

Andy had turned to the open hotel window, one hand on the windowsill.  
“Booker, when he told us he had family, we...well, we hadn’t offered to go with him. We told him where to find us, and he could have at any time, but-” she stopped, shook her head. “Would it have helped, having more proof? To be told by more than one source about what we are, how none of us chose it? I don’t know.”

She turned to Nile then, hands spread wide in a shrug.

“Seems to us like it might be worth finding out, though.”

That’s how they end up all piled into a car, Chicago outside the windows, behind them and before them, the city and her memories swirling around her like snow. When they get close enough to her home that she can hold it all inside no longer, she tells them all about her life here, the places where she lived and loved.

This was the park where she almost died once, launched off of her bike when the jacket tied around her waist had caught in the wheels of it halfway down a hill.

There was the art museum she and her mom visited every time they had a new exhibit, where they appraised every new piece as if they were bunk experts featured on the Antiques Roadshow, laughing so hard at each other’s appraisals that her stomach almost hurt too much for the ice cream they always got after, rain or shine.

That was the burger place she and her friends used to hang out at sometimes after school, sharing fries and milkshakes and milkshake-dipped fries, talking and joking until the sun burned low and the streetlights blazed high.

And here was her house, small, square, and blue, where she’d had her first kiss, where she and Josh wrestled over control of the TV remote, where her mom had held their family together, sturdy as the house’s walls around them.

She doesn’t realize there are tears in her eyes until Joe nudges her arm from the backseat, handing her a tissue. She takes it, but doesn’t use it, her fingers carefully unfolding it, lying it flat in her palm.

“We’re here for you, whenever you’re ready.” Andy says.

“Whatever you need,” Nicky adds.

They look at her, and she at each of them, at their smiles, eyes, their faces full of the reassurance and everything she needs to see in that moment to give her something to hold onto.

And here, she thinks, there is love.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback feeds the author, and is much appreciated.
> 
> As always, you can find me on tumblr @astral-kaysani


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